Chapter 37
“Ithought I would never see you again.” It came out before she had decided to say it.
The words rang in the quiet of the empty parlor, with the fire crackling and the spilled port soaking into the rug.
Magnus stood three feet away, bleeding, and watching her as though she were the only thing left in the world.
“When you rode out that morning,” she said, “I stood at the window and watched you leave. I told myself it did not matter, that I had made my choice and you had made yours. And when the days went by and no word came, I could no longer lie to myself about it.”
Her voice thinned, but she kept going. “I was so afraid, Magnus. Every hour. I would hear a horse in the street, and my heart would stop, half of me praying it was you and the other half certain it was a man coming to tell me you were dead. I did not cry where the servants could hear. I promised myself a long time ago that I was done crying myself to sleep. But I did not sleep, not once in the whole fortnight, and I lost my appetite. Abigail realized it in a single afternoon and was too kind to say so. Beatrice saw it and was not kind at all. She said it to my face, which was worse, and better.”
A faint, broken smile touched her mouth and disappeared.
“I learned exactly how empty and large a house can be with one person missing from it. I learned that I could have every freedom I ever wanted and every door in the place standing open, and it would mean nothing with you on the wrong side of one of them.”
“Rosaline—”
She lifted a hand. “No. Let me finish.”
Magnus went still.
She drew in a breath, unsteady now. “I have had a great deal of time these past weeks to think about what I said. And what I did not say. I was so afraid of losing you that I could not see you were fighting for the same thing I would have fought for.” Her eyes held his. “Family.”
The word nearly broke her.
“I, of all people, should have understood you. I should have met you with more grace than I did. I did not, and I am—”
“No.” He crossed the space between them in a single stride.
He stopped just short of touching her, his hands coming up and then hovering, uncertain of their welcome.
The uncertainty in a man so large undid her more than boldness could have.
“No. Ye’ll nae stand there and take the blame for this.
Ye were right, Rosaline. Ye were right about the entire business.
I was too proud and too haunted to hear ye, and I have spent the worst fortnight of me life learnin’ exactly how right ye were. ”
“You are bleeding on my brother’s rug.” She could not help it.
She had been watching the dark stain spread along his side since he came in.
She had been trying not to interrupt, but now the words came out unsteady and practical and entirely beside the point.
“Sit down. Sit down before you fall and let me see it. You may say the rest while I do, because I am not going to stand here and watch you bleed while you tell me things I have waited a fortnight to hear.”
He sat. Of course he sat because she had used the voice that did not allow an argument. It was the voice she had learned somewhere in the last year without noticing.
She knelt by his side, eased the ruined coat back, and gently peeled his shirt away from the wound. It was not deep, thank God, but a long, shallow cut along the ribs that had bled a great deal. It would mend cleanly, and her hands knew what to do despite the rest of her being in pieces.
She had not touched him in a fortnight. That was the thought that ambushed her as she knelt there with his warm blood on her fingers and his heart beating fast and hard beneath her hand.
It had been fourteen days since her hands had touched him, and here he was under them again, torn open and alive, and it took all of her composure not to press her face to the wound and weep from sheer relief that there was still a living man here to tend.
She had been so certain she had lost him.
She kept her eyes on the work and her hands steady.
She let the steadiness keep her upright, the way it always had.
She pressed her folded handkerchief to the wound.
He sucked in a breath through his teeth but did not move otherwise.
He let her work and watched her from beneath half-closed lids.
“I never stopped thinkin’ of ye,” he said quietly above her.
“Nae for an hour. That’s the thing I have to make ye understand.
Everyone believes a man on a hunt like mine thinks of nothin’ but the hunt, but it’s nae true.
Ye were always on me mind. Every door I opened, I heard ye.
Every room I walked into, I read the way ye taught me to read it.
I watched the hands, the eyes, the space between the fair word and the true one.
It was yer voice doin’ it, always yers. Every piece of that case, the ones I laid before we ever quarreled and the ones I laid after, I laid with ye standin’ at me shoulder.
And by the end ye werenae even speakin’ to me. ”
His hand lifted and settled lightly on her hair.
“I did the thing I set out to do, Rosaline. Oldbrook has been arrested. Me faither’s name will be cleared before the month is out.
I stood in that warehouse with the proof in me hand, the thing I dedicated all these years to, and it was ashes because ye werenae there to give it to. ”
Rosaline thought of the little golden fox on Abigail’s mantel, and of her own hollow afternoons and the safety that had tasted of nothing at all. They had spent the same fortnight in cold houses feeling the same thing and had been too proud to say so.
Her hands went still on the wound.
“I nearly died tonight,” Magnus said it plainly, and she looked up.
His face was grave and open in a way she had never quite seen it.
“That’s the truth of it, and ye may as well have it.
He had a knife at me throat, and I had nothing, and for one half-second, I was certain I was going to die on that floor the way me faither died.
And d’ye ken what came to me in that half-second?
Nae me faither. Nae honor.” His thumb moved once against her temple.
“But ye. Only ye. Yer face across a dinner table. Ye choosin’ me in a garden.
And the plain unbearable fact that I was about to die and I had never once told ye the truest thing in me, because I was too proud and too frightened, and I would go into the dark with it unsaid and leave ye believin’ I loved a dead man more than I loved you. ”
“Magnus—”
“Let me finish, lass. I’ve carried it three miles bleedin’ to say it.
” His voice roughened. “Livin’ isnae only honor.
It isnae only justice, or the past, or the debts we owe the dead.
I forgot that. I let it eat me whole. A man can spend so long fixin’ what was broken behind him that he walks straight off the edge of everythin’ good in front of him, and I nearly did.
I nearly threw away the one thing worth more than me faither’s name, and it was ye.
“And I am sorry. I am sorry I rode away. I am sorry I frightened ye and made ye feel the one thing I swore ye’d never feel again under a roof of mine, which was unsafe.
Ye trusted me nae to become another cage, and I became one, and I will regret that fortnight to the end of me days.
I watched ye learn to move through me house the way ye’d learned to move through yer braither’s—quiet and careful, keepin’ to the rooms I wasnae in.
I did that to ye. Me. The one man who swore ye’d never have cause to do it again.
And I did it without even the excuse of cruelty, which is somehow the worst of it, because I did it while lovin’ ye and told meself it was honor. ”
Rosaline had stopped pretending to tend the wound. She stayed there with her hand pressed over his wound and could not speak at all.
He covered her hand with his own.
“I cannae undo it,” he rasped. “I ken that. I cannae give ye back the fortnight, or unsay the words in that room, or make it so I never put that look on yer face. What’s done is done, and I’ll own it.
But I can build somethin’ new with ye from here, if ye’ll have me.
That’s what I came to ask. Nae as the man who cornered yer braither, nae as a bargain, a rescue, or a threat made good. ”
He drew her up gently until she was on her feet, until they were nearly the same height, with him seated and her standing close between his knees. He looked up at her with his face unguarded.
“Come home, Rosaline. Nae because ye’re trapped, nae because ye’ve nowhere else.
Ye’ve the entire world open to ye now, and yer braither will never trouble ye again.
Come home because ye choose it. As me partner.
Me equal. The other half of every hard thing I have ever had to do.
Me wife, me friend, the heart of me.” His voice dropped but did not shake.
“I love ye. I think I have loved ye since I met ye in that maze a year ago and been too much a coward to say it. I’m done bein’ a coward.
I love ye, and I want to spend the rest of me life provin’ it to ye. Will ye have me?”
For a moment, she could not answer at all.
She had dreamed about a version of this during the worst of her sleepless nights. In every version, she had imagined it would feel like a victory. But now, it did not feel like winning.
For her entire life, she had expected that if she ever stopped holding herself upright, there would be nothing beneath her. Now, for the first time, there was someone to lean toward, to hold her upright, to stand with.
Then the tears came, and she let them fall. She did not hide them or apologize for them because she was done making herself small in every way there was.
“I am still frightened,” she admitted. “I want you to know that, before I say the rest. I am still afraid of loving you this much, of how much of me is bound up in whether you come home at night. That does not go away simply because you have made a pretty speech, however good the speech was.”
She let out a tearful, helpless laugh. “But I have spent my entire life letting fear choose for me. Fear kept me a wallflower. Fear kept me small in my brother’s house.
Fear nearly kept me from you in that garden.
Fear made me walk out the door a fortnight ago.
And all the while, God help me, what I wanted was to stay and fight beside you.
You told me in the garden that you were giving me a choice.
And you know, it was the first time anyone had ever offered me a choice.
“I have turned that moment over every day since. And then you took it back that night by the fire, and it broke something in me, because I had let myself believe you meant it. But now I see that you were not taking it from me out of cruelty. You were only doing what I have done a hundred times for the people I love. I forgot, the way I have always forgotten, that the people you love are allowed to have a say in it, too.”
She cupped his face in her hands, the cut cheek, the bruised jaw, the tired lines of him. She made herself say the word she had folded away on her wedding night and hidden from herself for months.
“I love you, Magnus. I have loved you longer than I have been willing to admit, and I am tired, so tired, of being ruled by fear.
So, yes, I will have you. I will come home.
But I will not do it the way I did before, waiting in a beautiful room for you to come back from the dangerous parts of your life and tell me about them after.
You said it yourself just now, standing in that warehouse wishing I were beside you.
“So put me beside you when there is a hard thing to be done, a cold room to read, a dangerous man to take the measure of. You will not exclude me to keep me safe. You will bring it to me, and we will do it together, because that is what I meant a moment ago when I said I would fight beside you. I will come home, and I will do it the way you once said I should be allowed to do everything.”
She smiled through her tears. “Freely and of my own choosing. There is no one holding my arm this time. There is no Samuel, no bargain, and no scandal sheet. There is only me, standing in a wrecked parlor, choosing you because I want you and for no other reason in the world.”
Something bloomed in his face that she would remember for the rest of her life.
“That,” he said hoarsely, “is the only way I ever wanted to be chosen.”
She had spent her entire life believing that to be loved, she had first to be useful, to earn it, and to mold herself into whatever the person beside her needed and pray it was enough.
And here was a man who had just heard her choose him for no reason on earth but because she wanted him, and who looked at her as though she had handed him the world.
It had never occurred to her that she could simply be wanted. That it could be as simple as that.
Magnus rose, wounded and all, and gathered her in his arms. She rose onto her tiptoes to meet him the way she had learned to, the way she had always wanted to, and let him kiss her in the ruin of the cold house that had never once been a home.
It was not at all like the first time and everything like coming home.
She stopped being afraid and kissed him back, and chose him again with her whole heart, and went on choosing him and did not stop.